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Contemporary Ceramics Centre is located in London, opposite the British Museum. At the front of the gallery, a retail space displays studio ceramics from over 80 makers of the Craft Potters Association. This is complemented by a dedicated gallery space at the rear which hosts regular solo and group exhibitions. From a membership of nearly 400, five new makers are featured in the gallery every two months. This blog highlights their inspirational stories and tales of ceramics.

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eddie curtis margaret curtis

New Forms, New Textures

8 November - 1 December 2012

Eddie Curtis

The Blast
Series of works.

‘In the
summer of 2010 I revisited a particular stretch of coastline, locally referred to as ‘The Blast’ near my
home town, Seaham. I hadn’t been there for nearly forty
years. It had been the dumping ground
for the local coal mine until the mines were closed in the eighties. When I was very small I had walked along the
coast with my father, on ‘pay day’ to
collect his earnings from the wages office at the mine. We’d stop and he would point in the direction
of the horizon and explain that was where he worked; three miles out and deep
below the North Sea. It was a concept I could never come to terms
with. As a teenager I would occasionally
visit ‘The Blast’ with friends. This was
a place so desolate and grim it attracted various film producers and the iconic
movie ‘Get Carter’ starring Michael Caine concludes with the bad guy meeting
his fate here and finally being dropped out to sea from a coal conveyor. Later, the opening scene from ‘Aliens 3’ was
also shot here; a bleak testimony to the
qualities of The Blast landscape.

Forty
years on since my previous visit, nature has made an amazing attempt to reclaim what is hers and the
ravages of industry have been softened to a degree where a strange lunar kind
of landscape now prevails. The sea has removed nearly all of the
detritus and continues to eat away the
coal/sand aggregate leaving an exposed
shelf, revealing varying strata of industrial waste. At the foot of the limestone cliffs an iron
inclusion weeps red-brown stains into a large marooned rock pool known as ‘RedLake’.
Sun baked mud dries cracked and crazed with
visceral ooze seeping between the gaps. There is an overload of visual
metaphor and yet a strange stark beauty
has won over.’

Margaret Curtis

‘About 12 years ago I visited the Hagi area
of Japan where I was invited to the home and studio of Miwa Kyusetsu X1. My host was his son Kazuhiko Miwa, who had
been introduced to me by my daughter who had met Kazuhiko, a potter, ceramic
artist and architect, whilst on an arts residency in Hagi. Miwa Kyusetsu X1 was a national living
treasure so it was an extraordinary privilege to sit in the tea room and be
presented with three Chawan for my inspection.
It was here that I discovered the beautiful snow like whiteness of shino
with dark, blackened bare patches on the body of the clay.

Some time later, back in the UK, Alan Ault,
the director of Valentines Clays, asked me to try some samples of a new coarse
black clay. The idea of having a black
clay to use was both exciting and challenging and with some experiments, tweaks
and adjustments I finally came up with an adjusted clay body that suited me. I have used that clay ever since and my
current body of work involves bringing together this coarse gritty, dark
material with the beautiful qualities of thick unctuous porcelain slip.’